
Sunlight rakes the heights of the tsingy, where any rainfall is quickly shed. The
arid upper reaches favor mobile creatures such as dragonflies (here in a cooling
posture) as well as spiny, drought-tolerant Pachypodium plants (above).
as "a refuge within paradise," a place where a
kind of biology more familiar a century ago
can still be practiced and where simply walk-
ing around might put you face-to-face with a
creature never seen before.
"You can move between valleys and nd dif-
ferent things," Goodman said. " e tsingy for-
mations of Madagascar are one of the places on
Earth that hold extraordinary biological trea-
sures. You just have to go in and look around."
Going in is the hard part. In March, at the
end of the rainy season, just before the leaves
browned and fell and winter dried the forest s
thin streams, photographer Stephen Alvarez and
I traveled into the park. Rakotondravony had
agreed to guide us. It was his fourth trip to the
Tsingy de Bemaraha; he is one of a handful of
scientists who have gone there more than once.
We arrived in the capital, Antananarivo,
just a er the president had been overthrown
in a coup. Violent protests flared every few
days. Near the main square, soldiers lazed in
transport trucks smoking and sending text
messages, while on the university campus, stu-
dents rallied beneath white banners, only to be
driven back brutally. Tourism, a mainstay of
the economy, had nearly collapsed. We le the
city wondering if we d be stopped. But soon, in
the countryside, signs of the coup receded, the
weight of it felt only at police checkpoints, where
men in sandals cradled old AK-47s and asked
where we were going.
It took nearly ve days to reach the tsingy.
ree days out, the route deteriorated into a
deeply rutted dirt track that plunged through
troughs of dark mud. Ferries carried us across
rivers red with soil washed away in the a er-
math of deforestation upstream. Villages
shrank, cars vanished, the forest gradually
thickened. Every few miles Rakotondravony
leaped from our truck and ran into the bush.
He d return hauling a large snake or some
unhappy lizard.
From a trailhead (Continued on page 104)